Tag Archives: “Lycidas and Poetics”

Referring to the Cambridge Reading section on “Lycidas” I thought it was very interesting because at first reading the poem I understood that Milton was referring to someone that he cared about by stating the line ” And as he passes turn, And bid fair peace be to my stable shroud” for the use of his diction it allowed me to know that someone has properly died. However reading the poem straight threw at first I did not catch the Milton actually was refering to King Edward as the other shepherd like himself. What did stood out to me was that even if I didn’t notice that Milton was talking about King Edward I knew this person he was writing about had to be very important to him. Milton stating in lines 25-30 ” Together both, ere the high Lawns appear’d under the opening eyelids of the morn, we drove afield and both together heard. What time the Gray-fly winds her sultry horn, Batt’ning our flocks with the fresh dews of night, Oft till Star that rose, at Ev ning, bright” its as if the quote stood there to exhibit a friendship and a type of comparision between Milton and the other individual. Within the Cambridge I learned that King Edward and Milton where both attending the Cambridge University for their studies. The Cambridge book also expressed how it was King Edward who in which Milton has just lost as a companion, and he was left alone without the friend he had. Another thing that was interesting to me was the fact that the poem didn’t sound sad as if it was someone who had just lost his friend which you would think that Milton as the poet would stress his grief for the lost of his friend in the poem; by having the organist playing the funeral march break down in tears however the poem doesn’t express any grief. What Also caught my attention was that Evans expressed that the poem was about Milton’s own” anxieties concering the possibility of his own premature death”. That Milton’s personal anxieties was about his future direction of his own life which had me referred back to the sonnet VII: HOW SOON HATH TIME on pg.76 to lines 1-20 was referring to him wanting to do something great with his life especially when he was already 23 years old. Another thing that hit me was in the poem how Milton kept referring to sexual and political examples, and that made me start dwelling on his life. I began to think back to the background information I learned about his poem sonnet XXIII” Methought I saw my late Espoused Saint” for I examined his relationship with his first wife Mary Powell Milton who had died May/ 2/1652 three days after she gave birth to their daughter. For during the course of their relationship Mary had left Milton due to her wealthy family and so he wrote out a Doctrine and a Discipline of Divorce and even thou it was never carried out and Mary eventually did return back to Milton it still expressed politics within his life time. Milton’s poem’s to me seem to always incorporate something about his life and it’s hard not to always exclude what you know about a poet and just read the poems as it is written. However definitely knowing Miltons life helps me to understand his poems a little better!